Surprise: The Rich Are The Biggest Mortgage Deadbeats There Are

More than one in seven homeowners with loans in excess of a million dollars are seriously delinquent, according to data compiled for The New York Times by the real estate analytics firm CoreLogic.

By contrast, homeowners with less lavish housing are much more likely to keep writing checks to their lender. About one in 12 mortgages below the million-dollar mark is delinquent.

Of course, in a sense you'd expect this to be true. Back during the bubble there wasn't much of a ceiling on what kind of house the average person could afford, so on net, the more expensive a house was, the more likely the "homeowner" would be delinquent.

It's not totally clear that having a million-dollar-home was ever associated with the "financially well-to-do" (NYT's phrase), but if it was, then there's probably also an element of the rich being smart enough to walk away, as well.